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RSG, the Media Critic: “The Kids Are All Right”
Posted under GLBTQ issues, RSG's Guide to Lesbian Life by Recovering Straight GirlA couple of weeks ago I was invited to a screening of the film, “The Kids Are All Right,” starring Annette Benning and Julianne Moore. The publicity company contacted me and set me up with some sweet reserved press seats to which Cher and I were personally escorted to. This made me feel quite fancy and important and I liked the movie already. Ok, that didn’t really influence me but I did feel super posh.
I have thoughts about this movie and I’ve waited awhile to write about this until I was sure of those thoughts. If you haven’t seen the movie and don’t want to know the main storyline, don’t continue reading 
The story is about a lesbian couple with two teenage children, one of who recently turned 18. The children seek out their donor and make contact with him, much to the dismay of their moms. A relationship ensues: the donor with the daughter, the donor with the son and the donor with one of the moms (Moore.)
There were things I liked: I liked the fact that the lesbian couple was portrayed with normality–they were a typical couple dealing with life and family and frankly sometimes that is difficult and dready. They loved each other but had issues to work through just like most couples. They loved their children very much and gave them a good and stable home and raised them to be seemingly good people.
The acting was glorious. The photography was amazing. It was funny and touching in many parts.
Moore and Benning actually looked like middle aged women, which is refreshing.
There were things I didn’t like:
Many parts of the movie reinforce stereotypes that we as lesbians have tried to overcome. I would like to dispell them here:
1. Lesbians do not need to watch gay porn in order to get off. Many of us enjoy watching porn of different kinds and gay porn is pretty rad but it’s not a required accoutrement to lezzie sex.
2. Lesbians are not waiting for the right guy to come along or need a good fuck to make us realize we’re not gay.
3. Although I know many lesbians who enjoy wine (myself included,) we’re not all wine lushes.
The Julianne Moore character needed someone and something in her life that happened to turn out to be in the form of some straight fucking. Her self esteem was in the tank and she was needy and vulnerable and ended up with a dude. Although I understand this was an example of sexual fluidity, I don’t think that a mainstream audience will get this message.
This movie could have been more than it was. I realize that no matter how it would have been made, there would be people who would criticize it’s authenticity and resemblance to actual lesbian relationships.Lesbian relationships are not much different than hetero relationships, which is to say that they are unique to each couple.
Here’s what I think the movie got right: Sometimes peoples relationships get off track. Sometimes people cheat on their partners. Sometimes one person in a relationship forgets how amazing the other person is. Sometimes your relationship is strong enough to overcome adversity and sometimes it isn’t. Raising children under any circumstance is difficult. Sometimes being a mother sucks. That’s just real life and real life was represented in this movie. I just wish that the movie came with footnotes.
That was about the most straightforward review of this movie that I’ve read. Still don’t know if I want to see it though.
I am glad to read your take on this movie.. A few of my lezzie friends who have seen it shared similar sentiments. The more I hear, the more I think I will wait for it on video.
Hi RSG,
Don’t think I’ve commented on your blog before but I do read it on a regular basis. It’s a joy and a pleasure to read by the way. I agree with Syd about your review. I have read many reviews trying to decide whether or not I will see this movie . I think I’ve came up with a solution to the plot line we all seem to have a problem with. Let everthing take place as set up in the movie except when donor dad comes to meet the moms he brings his girlfriend. Relationships develope all around as in the original plot, but the affair is between Jules and said girlfriend.Now that is a story I could willingly suspend my disbelief for. As the plotline is set up in this latest version of a lesbian movie that even hetero men will by into I don’t think I even want to get an image of Mark Ruffalo’s naked hairy ass much less see the real thing. I think I’ll pass.
K-K: I like your storyline better!
I do think it was worth seeing but I fear what the mainstreamers will walk away with.
I thought it was entertaining in parts, good acting (especially by the kids), but overall disappointing because of the stereotypes, and the stupid choices I think Jules made. I really didn’t like that it was a supposed “Lesbian” movie, and the only sex in it was straight sex (and lots more than I ever needed to see), and gay men sex. I think the plot should have focused more on the lesbian couple and their kids, than on the infidelity. The part where she opened his jeans and said “Ohhh yeah” as if c*ock was the best thing she’d ever seen was just nauseating. I realize that some lesbians get off on that, but I agree that the mainstream public will have reinforced stereotypes that lesbian sex isn’t enough. I also thought it was wrapped up a bit too neatly in the end. I was actually shocked when I went home and looked up the director and found out she was a lesbian, and a mother. She said in one interview I read when asked about “lesbian backlash of the movie” that it was about Jules having an affair with a man, but still holding strong to her sexual orientation” (so then it’s okay?). She also said it made sense they got together, because they had a “kid together.” Ummmmm no…she had a kid with her partner, not the sperm donor.
Dan Savage has an interesting article in The Stranger about the movie, and how it has conservative bias. You should look it up.
I’ll consider it. I would have to wait for it to come out on Netflix because it won’t be shown in a theatre anywhere near me. I’m kinda close to Syd, except I’m in Bumfuck, La. as opposed to Bumfuck, Ms.
I also agree with you about how mainstream America will view our lives and relationships after seeing this movie. I try not to be too hard on the movie makers , but damn give me some hope that one day a movie like this will be made that actually has some semblance
to the lives we lead.
My rant is over now. Thanks for allowing me the space to do that.
I had made up my mind not to see this, based on what I had read and seen, and I haven’t changed my mind.
Good review, cheers.
Hey, RSG — I want you to start writing screenplays now, will you? Cuz you could do it up.
As much as people want to think gay vs. hetero is different, you’re right, relationships are relationships and we’re more alike than people feel comfortable admitting. My parents have been married for 46 years….my mom could have given Jules’ speech towards the end about life and relationships/marriages are hard. My mom and I had a conversation recently, where she admitted that the entire 46 years hasn’t been “rainbows and butterflies”…life is hard, marriage is hard, raising kids is hard, but she would rather have gone throught it all with my dad than not at all….and of course there were good times too.
The children and parents struggling with the whole, donor/father issue and the do we want to know who he is or not issue, is totally real. I’ve had a conversation recently with a woman going through that with her children. She has one child through a donor and one child she adopted.
I agree with you that Jules was in a place of low self-esteem and is trying to figure out something fulfilling of her own as her children get older and leave. But I was totally disappointed in the affair with the donor. It just plays into what everyone else in society assumes about lesbians.
I liked the movie because of the obvious complexity of what it must be like to meet up with a donor. I think it would have been a completely different story if they had had to use an egg donor. The kids already had mothers, so there would have been no competition aspect. The boy in the story was clearly feeling an absence of a father relationship, though it was really surprising how the meet up inspired the daughter to realized she might like one, too.
The part that bothered me was how the donor character could be emotionally intelligent in dealing with the children, having insights and treading carefully, and then be such an ape with women. He hurtfully disregarded the one woman who really did want to be with him and make a family (Foxy) while thinking he could just help himself to an insta-family with somebody who was already spoken for, on his own whim.
Regarding the unzipping scene, I wondered if there was a little subtext that she had already had this man’s sperm inside her and made a baby with it, and now she was connecting with the source. Maybe that’s reaching, I don’t know. I just don’t think she would have picked any other man in the situation she was in with her life issues at the time. She had been scared to meet him and then found out she liked him as a person, and it was probably very intoxicating to her that he gave her a first job when she was feeling so insecure about the venture.
The worst part of the movie to me was that here was this sympathetic donor wannabe dad who really seemed to care about the kids but didn’t even fathom for a moment what an epic betrayal it would be to essentially break apart their family for his own gratification. In the end I decided that he was just being who he always had been, kind of a dim bulb who could only occasionally do something good.
I was hoping someone who came out late in life, having been married to a man, would review this for me. I agree with Syd and the others, your review is certainly the most straightforward one I’ve read, and I appreciate that.
I feel like I need a little education though, and I was hoping someone else who had come out later in life could shed some light for me. I just don’t understand the idea that apparently people think that women are lesbians because the “right” man hasn’t come along. My coming out world has been almost the reverse of that story, so it’s new for me to hear. I’ve spent the last five years in the world (mostly online) of isolated women married to men, women who have discovered very late that their attraction for other women is undeniable. Many of us did not come out of marriages that were horrible in and of themselves, to men who were abusive or alcoholic or assholes. Many of us have been shocked and grief-stricken to discover that following our inner identity, as we now understand it, will disintegrate the family structures we worked so hard to stabilize.
So in the midst of that overwhelming reality, I found the story line of the movie bewildering. Maybe I’m too new here. But I just don’t get it.
In any case, I thank you for the first truly intelligible, balanced review of the movie I’ve read. And congrats on the free passes!
And thank you for still being out there. I used to read you when I was terrified and in the closet and when I thought I could never come out. Your blog is one of many supporting elements in my coming out. And the memories of hanging on to your writing when I couldn’t come out yet have inspired me to blog too.
Keep it up, sister.
@K-K, I DO like that story line a lot better!
That said, my wife and I went to see this movie yesterday in the theater. I honestly did NOT think it would come to town here and there were more people (and obviously straight couples) there than I expected. I am going to have to do a blog post myself about sexual “fluidity” or what ever. I simply don’t see what all the huge controversy is over the fact that the character slept with a man. I thought it was perfectly obvious WHY she cheated. Annette Benning is a fabulous actress and a beautiful woman, but the character she played grated on me like nails on a chalk board most of the time. Could be that I was once married to an alcoholic, could be that I HATE the passive/aggressive shit that so many lesbians devolve into. I don’t know. However, I LOVED her in the scene at the “family dinner” both when she genuinely tries to connect with “the donor” and later when she realizes what has happened. And I loved her when she told the guy he was an “interloper” and that if he wanted a family to go make his own. Brava!
As for Julianne Moore and her character, I NEVER for one moment had any doubt that what she was doing was a “fling”. There was no question about where her ultimate loyalty–and sexuality–lay. But 20 years of being treated the way her partner treated her? Yeah, I’d probably be looking for a fling, too. I mean, if the movie had been about a het couple and the husband had spoken like Nic did to Jules? C’mon, all the women out there would have been rooting for her to have an affair–with a man, a woman, somebody–just to get her some validation. But to love someone and constantly be put in “second place” because your interests or job choices or whatever are not “up to par”. That’s soul killing. Maybe I’ve been on the receiving end of those digs and so I’m more sensitive to them, I don’t know.
Yeah, the heterosex scenes were more than I wanted. And the “sex” scene between the 2 women..feh. But that was the idea…to show the distance that had grown between them and for THAT it was perfect. I could seriously also do without the gay porn, too, but hey, whatever floats your boat, right?
Otherwise, I thought this movie was well-acted all the way round. The characters were believable and yes, the subject is one that I’m sure more and more gay couples are going to have to deal with–at least the kids wanting to meet the donor part. As RSG said, there are always going to be people who find fault with this movie for various reasons, and that’s okay, too. But I thought it was a good, solid movie. However, if you want a REAL in depth dissection of the movie, go to AfterEllen.com and read Sinclair Sexsmith’s opus. It’s great!
GG
You explained it very well.
I’ve actually just assumed that most women just need a good fuck from me to realize that they’re actually lesbians.
Or am I doing this wrong?
No Limpy, you’re doing it exactly right.
I WANTED to like this movie–and I liked almost every single solitary part in it–the director, most of the actors. the donor dad (the actor) i can do without. I dunno. I liked Benning’s haircut. That’s about it. Too bad.
Yep, you nailed it.
We also got invited to a complementary screening of the film and loved it. I think your review nailed it.
@Making Space – I am a “latebian” who left her marriage to a man. I have alot more questions than answers but I think that the storyline of the film rings true – it is universally about relationships and how good people can take each other for granted, can fail each other, can be forgiven and forgive themselves.
Overall, excellent film. Oh, and thank you thank you thank you to Annette and Julianne for looking their ages. Sexy is not exclusively for the young.
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